06-24-14: BifwynneHi Bruce,
I'm hoping Al and Ralph weigh in here to help us better understand the relative significance of phase coherence as compared to other factors.
As I indicated earlier, speaker technology is not one of my areas of expertise, and about all I can offer is my suggestion that some insight into that degree of significance can potentially be gained by attempting to correlate one's subjective reaction to a wide range of quality speakers with JA's step response plots for those speakers.
I'm hoping Al (Almarg) and Ralph (Atmasphere) get around to reading Roy's articles and sharing their comments.I've read through the "Loudspeaker Phase Accuracy and Musical Timing" article. IMO it is a brilliant and informative article, which certainly inspires very high confidence in the designer. But my feeling, consistent with Kiddman's comments, is that in audio there are always multiple ways to achieve success.
Best regards,
-- Al